Another week and another GPU review....wait, hold on. This time it is four separate GPU reviews all rolled into one!

Before today, we hadn't looked at any GTS 250 cards due to the fact that we were waiting to see which direction the lineup took. Now that cards have begun going on sale for some amazing prices, we figured that the time was right to take a look at a few competing solutions.

Up today: EVGA, Gigabyte, ASUS and for the first time here at HWC: Sparkle.

I also invite everyone to check out the two pages of warranty and RMA support information we have in this roundup. It should help many of you make an informed decision.

I have an XFX gts250 and another one on the way. Cannot wait to sli them and see where they land in the performance realm. I love getting the lower end cards and trying multi card stuff to see how they perform. I had a P5Q Pro board before I switched to the 680i and xfired a pair of 4830s. They rocked the party. At stock speeds they outperformed the 4870 and when overclocked (I had powercolor and they overclocked remarkably well when xfired), they were on par with xfired 4850s at stock speed and blew the 4870 away. I think these will also show impressive results when slied. I will let everybody know when I get the system up and running at full strength. (Also going under water so the rebuild time will be a little longer). I like my gts250 so far. Runs well, folds well, games well for a $120 solution.

Some pretty decent looking coolers there, even if some of them didn't perform quite as well as I'd like to see.

It's great to see Sparkle trying to make inroads into Canada (Newegg's influence?), and it would be really interesting to see if the high(er) OC clocks you got with their card were just the luck of the draw, or if it can be replicated by end users as these things hit the market.

One of the things (I think I harp on this a lot, but it's important to me.... :) ) I'm curious about is the ability to set custom fan profiles with the manufacturer's software.... I know that the ASUS software allows for setting temp related fan speed profiles on ATI cards, does that functionality follow through with their Nvidia offerings? Do any of the other manufacturers' software have this ability?

Finally.... Wasn't it the EVGA software that allowed for bumping of GPU voltages? Does that work with the GTS250 cards?

Very nice review. I want to point out that on the overclocking results page, the picture for the EVGA overclock is wrong, showing the Sparkle one instead.
Other than that, very informative. Sparkle seems to have some oomph if you're gaming on a 1680x1050 screen, especially considering it having half the RAM of the other cards.

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Originally Posted by encorp

I don't know, maybe if you get a big enough compacticator you can put it in your butt and name yourself "sexbuttplug"...